People like to badmouth the choice of Zack Snyder to direct Warner’s Superman reboot, Man of Steel, but if you throw out Sucker Punch, which was indeed terrible, he did a decent job with The Watchmen, and if you can handle Dr. Manhattan, it seems to follow that you should be able to handle Superman, who’s just Dr. Manhattan with underpants. Anyway, here’s the latest trailer for Man of Steel, screenplay by David S. Goyer and Christpher Nolan, starring Henry Cavill as Superman, Dianne Lane as Martha Kent (way too attractive to be named “Martha”), and cameos from Kevin Costner as Pa Kent, Russell Crowe as Jor-El, Michael Shannon as General Zod, and Amy Adams as Lois Lane. There don’t seem to be any Justice League hints, thank God, but neither does Zod flog himself or drown any Jews a la Boardwalk Empire. Call it a wash.

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Studios love 3D because they can charge more for it, but with the exception of a few who truly love it (James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese of late), most filmmakers seem like they just sort of go along with it as a compromise. “Eh, sure, go ahead and convert it to 3D if you must, just leave me alone.” Chris Nolan, on the other hand, has earned the right (read: the money) to tell the studio to suck his jeans if he wants to. And that’s why The Dark Knight Rises, the most anticipated movie of the year and probably the easiest to get people to pay a premium for, won’t be in 3D.

“The question of 3-D is a very straightforward one,” Nolan said in a recent interview. “I never meet anybody who actually likes the format, and it’s always a source of great concern to me when you’re charging a higher price for something that nobody seems to really say they have any great love for.

“It’s up to the audience to tell us how they want to watch the movies. More people go see these films in 2-D, and so it’s difficult data to interpret. And I certainly don’t want to shoot in a format just to charge people a higher ticket price.”

For some filmmakers, you could ascribe not wanting to shoot in 3D to simple laziness, since the 3D rigs are more complicated and less maneuverable (The Avengers was post-converted for similar reasons). But not in Nolan’s case.

Nolan shot nearly half of his Batman finale using bulky IMAX cameras, whose 70mm frame is about 10 times the size of standard movie film. He also insisted that distributor Warner Bros. release “The Dark Knight Rises” in at least 100 IMAX cinemas that can project it on film rather than in the digital format that has been gradually replacing celluloid. [Salon]

Basically, Chris Nolan cares, and that’s why people like him. He’s like a British Ryan Gosling in that way.

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Okay, internet, there’s a new Dark Knight Rises trailer out, commence pants sh*tting. This one has a lot of the same stuff we’ve seen….

• Bane, his mask, the sherpa jacket of doom
• Tom Hardy’s pillowy, smoochable lips HEY! Who typed that!
• Hines Ward outrunning people as the football field explodes
• Bruce Wayne dancing with Catwoman at one of those masquerade parties they only have in movies
• Batman and Bane fighting on the courthouse steps

Plus some new-ish stuff…

• More Joseph Gordon-Levitt
• Bruce Wayne in a hole
• The bridges out of Gotham blowing up
• Batman’s hoverjet thingie

And you know shit’s getting serious, because Morgan Freeman is there, making his “shit’s gettin’ serious” face. It’s kind of Morgan Freeman’s thing.

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(UPDATE: Sorry, no more pictures, we’ve been lawyer-f*cked. But you can still click-through and imagine what was there).

Following their semi-disastrous Hobbit presentation yesterday, Warner Bros released these new promo stills (via the SuperHeroHype forums) from The Dark Knight Rises, which opens July 20th (and which I have in our Fantasy Summer Box Office Game – HA!). In case Bane didn’t already look enough like a mumbly date rapist, now you can see that his pits are shaved. Also, I realize they probably wanted to fill the frame, but no one fights like that, at least no one outside of a stage production of Peter Pan. It looks like they’re playing crotch tag.

(couple more pictures on the following pages)

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One of the things about January-February is that it’s the time of year when studios dump all their movies no one gives a crap about, thus we have plenty of time to speculate wildly about summer movies even though they won’t be out for six months. Case in point, yesterday, I reported a Collider story based on a tip from an insider, saying Bane’s unintelligible dialog in the Dark Knight Rises prologue (note: not the trailer, in which he’s pretty easy to understand), had been remixed, lowering the background noise and making it easier to understand.  Which seemingly would’ve been in line with what director Chris Nolan had said about it, that the plan was to alter the sound slightly, but not rework it altogether.

But now Collider has recanted their original story after speaking with IMAX and Warner Bros, who both confirmed that the sound mix has not been altered in anyway. (One of my Twitter followers saw the prologue last night, and reports that Bane is still all but impossible to understand). Meaning, I guess, that someone emailed Collider a fake story to screw with them. Because people do that? Dude, I don’t even… .

Now, let’s never speak of this again.

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